I’ve been reading Frey, Carl Benedikt and Osborne, Michael A. (2013) The Future of Employment: how susceptible are jobs to computerisation?  I am quite pleased with the graph I scribbled on the paper as a neat summary of the main thrust of the argument.

img_0954

The article reminded me of a recent headline I saw: 65% of today’s schoolchildren will eventually be employed in jobs that have yet to be created (according to this U.S. Department of Labor report.) This, in turn, reminded me of John F Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas on September 12, 1962. “We shall send to the moon… a giant rocket… made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented”.

There is an optimism associated with this period (early 1960s) which I intentionally tried to tap into when I chose the following image for my learning technology intranet site:

transformers

Image: Gerd Leonhard

It captures a sense of wonder and excitement associated with technology. I anticipated there would be some colleagues resistant to the kinds of technologies and services I was employed to support, and I wanted to ‘brand’ my service as light touch and optimistic.

Is it possible to still share that optimism in 2016? How do digital technologies (in particular social media) contribute to a dystopian vision of the future? I hope to explore this further in future blog posts.

 

 

 

In the future, we will all be… / Reflections From A Digital Education Student by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0